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Cowbee [he/they]

@ Cowbee @lemmy.ml

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3 yr. ago

Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us

He/him or they/them, doesn't matter too much

Marxist-Leninist ☭

Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don't know where to start? Check out my Marxist-Leninist study guides, both basic and advanced!

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  • "Intellectuals," or whatever term you wish to describe them as, are not a class, but a subsection of every class. Each class has its own "intellectuals," there are proletarian intellectuals and there are capitalist intellectuals. What the vanguard is, is a group of the working classes dedicated to revolution, professional revolutionaries. They are not "elites." Here's a diagram from Lady Izdihar, with the "organized core" being the vanguard:

    Classes are not simply any way you can categorize people, but specific social relations to production. Yes, steel workers are often members of vanguard parties. I organize with a communist party and have a full-time job. I'm not "acting" like you're mistaken, you are mistaken, you do not know how vanguards function nor how democracy works within vanguards and socialist countries with vanguard parties, otherwise you wouldn't be acting like vanguards are a "class" and that they aren't democratic.

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  • Vanguards are both worker run and democratic. Vanguards are a subsection of the working classes, not a class of their own or outside class struggle, and are both democratic internally, as well as establishing systems of democracy externally. I'm really not sure where you're getting the idea that believing the working class needs to be organized for revolution means democracy is suddenly off the table.

    For example, in the USSR, first-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about. Today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference for other socialist countries, with their own forms of democracy.

    So again, why lie about what I believe? I'm not responsible for you not knowing what a vanguard is or how socialist democracy works, but you feel very confident in telling me that I'm lying about it.

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  • Nope, not what I believe at all, and the fact that you have to invent my beliefs proves you can't actually argue against my real ones.

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  • You are indeed correct. Lemmy.world is less democratic than dbzer0.

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  • I'm not defending mass murder, I'm defending the right of the working classes of Russia to overthrow the brutally violent Tsarist regime, and their right to defend the new socialist system they created. I'm defending the revolutionary leader that helped organize and facilitate that progressive movement that freed the working classes of Russia from conditions so brutal they died at an average age of 33, in wooden shack houses with minimal heating, all while the Tsar and capitalists made vast quantities of money and colonized the surrounding areas.

    You're batting for the Tsar. The Russian working classes killed the Tsarists and capitalists that had been terrorizing them for centuries.

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  • This is vulgar class reductionism. The US and Germany are both imperialist countries that bribe their proletarians with a share of the spoils of international plunder. Israel is a genocidal settler-colony that serves as a forward base for imperialist countries in West Asia. Not only is this vulgar class reductionism, but it's intentional misinterpretation. Saying "death to xyz country" means elimination of the state and the system, not genocide on the people of said country.

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  • I don't think it's particularly interesting that anarchists defederated from Zionists.

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  • You're arguing against the people wielding their power against Zionists and in favor of Zionists being able to speak freely. You moved to an instance with stricter defederation, showing you don't care about defederation in the abstract, but what was being defederated.

  • What do we do now that we found out the world is run by a billionaire parasitic class??

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  • By applying dialectical materialism, as opposed to metaphysics and idealism.

    The 3 major assertions of idealism are as follows:

    1. Idealism asserts that the material world is dependent on the spiritual
    2. Idealism asserts that spirit, or mind, or idea, can and does exist in separation from matter. (The most extreme form of this assertion is subjective idealism, which asserts that matter does not exist at all but is pure illusion.)
    3. Idealism asserts that there exists a realm of the mysterious and unknowable, "above," or "beyond," or "behind" what can be ascertained and known by perception, experience, and science.

    The 3 basic teachings of materialism as counterposed to idealism are:

    1. Materialism teaches that the world is by its very nature material, that everything which exists comes into being on the basis of material causes, arises and develops in accordance with the laws of motion of matter.
    2. Materialism teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside and independent of the mind; and that far from the mental existing in separation from the material, everything mental or spiritual is a product of material processes.
    3. Materialism teaches that the world and its laws are fully knowable, and that while much may not be known there is nothing which is by nature unknowable.

    Mechanistic materialism makes certain dogmatic assumptions:

    1. That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties;
    2. That the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause;
    3. That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;
    4. That each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.

    Dialectical materialism holds instead:

    1. The world is not a complex of things but of processes;
    2. That matter is inseperable from motion;
    3. That the motion of matter comprehends an infinite diversity of forms which arise one from another and pass into one another;
    4. That things exist not as separate individual units but in essential relation and interconnection.

    Putting it all together, we get the following:

    1. Dialectical materialism understands the world, not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which all things go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.
    2. Dialectical materialism considers that matter is always in motion, that motion is the mode of existence of matter, so that there can no more be matter without motion than motion without matter. Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.
    3. Dialectical materialism understands the motion of matter as comprehending all changes and processes in the universe, from mere changes of place right to thinking. It recognizes, therefore, the infinite diversity of the forms of motion of matter from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.
    4. Dialectical materialism considers that, in the manifold processes taking place in the universe, things come into being, change and pass out of being, not as separate individual units, but in essential relation and interconnection, so that they cannot be understood each separately and by itself but only in their relation and interconnection.

    Karl Marx created dialectical materialism by turning Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Then, he applied it to the progression of society, creating historical matetialism. By analyzing social structures and progress as a dialectical process based in materialism, we can learn from history and analyze where it's going. This is scientific socialism in progress.

  • What do we do now that we found out the world is run by a billionaire parasitic class??

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  • The problem is, as people gain power, it rots their mind and ruins their perceptions, so we have this recurring theme running throughout our history.

    This isn't actually observable, though. Having managerial positions, administration, etc doesn't cause cognitive deficiency nor a "turning evil" in a religious, supernatural sense. What actually happens is classes act in their class interest. The proletariat as manager isn't seeking to establish itself as an entrenched, permanent ruling class, but instead to abolish itself as a class. Capitalists, monarchs, etc. all seek to maintain their individual privledges.

    What is natural for human behavior is detetmined by the conditions of our social existence, ie how we produce and distribute. This means the idea of a static, fixed, unchanging "human nature" that cannot handle organizing at scale is false. The reason these myths persist is because they discourage action against unjustifiable systems today.

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  • Yet another example of why the abstract concept of "authoritarianism" is useless. In this case, the people of dbzer0 decided democratically to wield their authority to defederate from an instance with an explicit Zionist problem. It isn't the defederation that's the problem in the abstract, or the authority, it's the fact that this authority was used against Zionists.

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  • Yep, or they realize it means democratic control by the proletariat, dictatorship against capitalists and fascists, as Marx intended, but then think socialist countries all misunderstood Marx and established capitalist-style dictatorships of the few. This is a deeply chauvanist attitude though, that assumes people in socialist countries too stupid to understand basic Marxist concepts (despite having higher functional literacy rates than the US Empire).

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  • Lemmy.ml has a lot of communists, and dbzer0 is mainly anarchists with some communists as well. We have a lot more in common with each other than with feddit.org, which as we can see has a bad history with Zionism at the admin level. It's entirely consistent to defederate feddit.org, which dbzer0 voted for as an instance, while remaining federated with Lemmy.ml.

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  • Liberalism arose as a bourgeois ideology to use against the feudalist systems, the equivalent in feudalism being the clergy and the church. The mode of production capitalism is based on individual ownership of capital, and claiming the labor-power sold by workers is equal in position to the capitalists buying the labor-power and selling commodoties.

    Liberalism was left when feudalism was dominant. Putting it in its historical context, it helped overthrow feudalism. However, there is no "Absolute Idea" of Hegel, what was progressive at one point is still reactionary at a later point. In the era of capitalist decay, socialism is on the left, the progressive ideology.

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  • The bolsheviks never targeted the cultural Cossack people, nomadic Steppe horse riders, but instead "Cossacks," Tsarist troops that ran down peasants on horseback. They had the same name because the Tsar relied heavily on recruiting the Cossack people, but it wasn't a random decision to commit genocide like you're framing. That's why your own link says information on the subject is highly blurred and contested:

    Several scholars have categorised this as a form of genocide,[6][7][8][9][10] whilst other historians have highly disputed this classification due to the contentious figures involved, which range from "a few thousand to incredible claims of hundreds of thousands".[11][12][13]

    Lenin didn't order the deaths of random people. Lenin led a revolution, one which overturned the incredibly brutal Tsarist system. Lenin did not unilaterally impose socialism, it was something fought for by the working classes. The White Army (the Tsarist forces), the fourteen capitalist nations that invaded Russia during its revolution, and the former ruling classes were all fought by the revolutionary peoples led by Lenin. In eliminating Tsarism, and establishing socialism, the transition from pure squalor resulted in doubling of life expectancy, tripling of literacy rates to 99.9%, free and high quality healthcare and education for all, the right to a job, certified home ownership, and much more.

    Mark Twain spoke this of the French Revolution:

    THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

    The Russian Revolution was much the same. Hundreds of millions of lives were uplifted and saved by it. That is why Lenin is remembered as a hero even in post-socialist Russia.

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  • I assume so, but you never know 🤷

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  • Why not? Marx supported the Paris Commune, and was critical of them for not going far enough to solidify the revolution. Marx supported communists and revolutionaries, he was an organizer himself.

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  • It is, though. "Tankie" isn't an ideology, it's a pejorative typically used against Marxists that serves as a strawman of Marxist beliefs.

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  • "Tankie" is just a pejorative for communist, though. That's like saying you said "commie," not "communist."

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  • Communists and fascists are diametric opposites. Communists seek to collectivize production and distribution to fulfill the needs of everyone. Fascists seek the preservation of private property and the extermination of labor organizers. Lazily equating the two and doing nothing to back it up is just "enlightened" centrism.